A couple who thought they had won the £35million Lottery jackpot has been left empty handed after failing to top up their online Lotto account properly.

Despite picking all six winning numbers, Edwina and David Nylan, from Leicester, have missed out on become millionaires overnight as the Lotto mobile app they use to play did not register their purchase.

When they called to claim their jackpot prize, Lotto operator Camelot told them they had no record of the transaction.

Mrs Nylan, 55, said: “I am gutted, but what can we do? We have played for years, and had our online account for some time, so it is not as if we didn’t know what we were doing.

“I have just had to carry on with things and not get too down.

“Shocked isn’t the word, but as a family we stick together and just have to be grateful for what we’ve got.”

The error occurred when Mrs Nylan, a grandmother of seven, first tried to buy her £2 ticket online for the Lotto draw last Wednesday, on December 23, and her account showed she had insufficient funds.

She tried to top up her account and bought a ticket with the numbers 01 – 02 – 04 – 19 – 28 – 41.

The winning numbers for the draw on Mrs Nylan’s phone

Mrs Nylan says the app then confirmed her purchase had gone through despite Camelot saying there was no record of the payment.

Mrs Nylan said: “David has an app on his phone which he uses to generate random numbers.

“We scribbled them down, and they are stored on his phone.

“When the numbers came up, it looked like we had got all six and had won the jackpot but when I checked, there was nothing from Camelot.

“I rang customer services at Camelot and the person I spoke to said they could see from their records that we had intended to buy those numbers but they said the purchase did not go through because we only had 60p in our account.

“We had tried to top up the account, and hadn’t realised that hadn’t registered either.

“You get an email to confirm your purchase, but I didn’t remember to check because it was just before Christmas and I was so busy.

The couple have appealed to Camelot to award them the money despite the mistake.

Camelot confirmed the couple did make multiple attempts to buy a ticket – but said only successfully purchased tickets can generate a win.

A spokeswoman for the company said: “The player did attempt to purchase an online Lotto ticket multiple times on December 23 from 7pm onwards (the cut-off to buy tickets is 7.30pm), however there were insufficient funds in the player’s account – so the attempted purchases were not successful.

“The player would have received an error message on every occasion confirming this.”